Cooking

‘Bouchon Bakery,’ ‘Salt Sugar Smoke,’ and More

The star chefs continue to twinkle, street food trumps haute cuisine, and no one ever gets tired of Southern cooking. These are the big messages of the current season’s cookbooks, most of them heavily influenced, in visual style and in content, by the relentless advance of food television. In days of yore, cookbooks had a few line drawings and the big authors weren’t chefs — because chefs were, for the most part, anonymous. The world has spun on its axis quite a few times since then. Today a front-burner cookbook has Busby Berkeley production values, a marquee name above the title and a heavy investment in fantasy, promising to take readers to exotic ports of call or inside the mind of a culinary genius.

BOUCHON BAKERY (Artisan, $50), oversize and sumptuous, brings heavyweight credentials to the genius category. The nominal author is Thomas Keller, whose first restaurant, the French Laundry in Yountville, Calif., is routinely described as the best in the United States, while Per Se, his Manhattan restaurant, is just as routinely called the best in New York.

Keller’s new cookbook invites readers to ascend the lower slopes of his soaring empire. Just as “Bouchon,” published in 2004, celebrated his bistros of the same name, this cookbook draws its inspiration — and recipes — from his chain of bakeries, which are overseen by the pastry chef Sebastien Rouxel, his co-author.

This is a real cookbook. Those who were daunted by “The French Laundry Cookbook” can easily tackle homey sweets like pecan sandies or chocolate cherry scones, or slightly more ambitious productions like the apricot flan tart. It must be said, though, that going to Keller for a blueberry muffin recipe seems a little like hiring Frank Gehry to design your birdhouse. As the pages turn, things get more complex, but instructional photos assist, and the book retains a sense of whimsy. Peanut butter transforms the classic Paris-Brest cake into Bouchon Bakery’s “Paris-New York.” Even the bacon and chicken-liver dog biscuits look scrumptious.

Keller enjoys an exalted reputation but maintains a modest public profile. Reverse the equation for Jamie Oliver, Exhibit A for anyone making the case that television now shapes the culinary landscape. There he is, on the cover of JAMIE OLIVER’S GREAT BRITAIN (Hyperion, $35), wearing a loud plaid shirt and holding a big platter of roast beef with potatoes. A self-answering question immediately arises: Have we not had just about enough of this cheeky chappie?

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Illustration by Julia Rothman

But wait. Turn to Page 16, the first recipe in the book, and behold a grubby-looking frying pan filled to capacity with fried eggs, sausage, bacon, black pudding, mushrooms and tomatoes, with a mug of milky tea and a bottle of HP Sauce on the side. This is the unrehabilitated English breakfast that Oliver fondly calls “the full monty,” a breakfast, he dearly hopes, that you too can love.

It strikes the keynote for his sentimental tour of the workaday classics that define British comfort food: pies, puddings, roasts, pub grub, afternoon tea cakes and lots of root vegetables. Oliver restores all of these to a place of honor, updating throughout with a deft hand. The book is beautifully produced, with period typefaces and graphic elements to go with the travelogue-style photographs of Britain’s culinary byways, many of them featuring Oliver at work and play.

Fried black pudding at 7 a.m. is not to all tastes, believe it or not, but sensitive stomachs can skip right to the simple and sweet St. Clement’s cake, named after an old-fashioned nonalcoholic pub drink. It’s a teatime favorite in the Oliver family and a snap to make, a single layer of almond cake soaked with orange syrup and iced with lemon frosting.

In cookbooks, modesty can be a virtue. Diana Henry, another English cook, harks back to the quietly authoritative style of writers like Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson. In SALT SUGAR SMOKE: How to Preserve Fruit, Vegetables, Meat and Fish (Mitchell Beazley, $29.99), she takes on an unusual subject, making foods last and enhancing their flavor by salting, sweetening or smoking them.

Henry steers the reader gently through unfamiliar terrain and dispenses good advice as she explains how to pickle vegetables, brine meats and make all sorts of jams, mustards and vinegars. “Label and date what you make,” she advises. “When you labor over 20 jars of something, you feel sure that you will always know what’s in them, but you won’t.” None of the techniques are daunting, except for hot smoking. And home cooks who have a hard time locating Asian pepper sauces and pastes can now make them from scratch, the Diana Henry way.

The quest for comfort knows no borders. While Jamie Oliver trekked the British byways in search of fish pies, Julie Richardson found her sweet spot in the attic above Baker & Spice, her bakery and cafe in Portland, Ore. There, a long-forgotten box filled with old recipes, some dating back to the 1920s, gave her the inspiration for VINTAGE CAKES (Ten Speed Press, $24), a love letter to all-American desserts.

Richardson tested and tweaked until she had a full roster of single-layer cakes, multilayer cakes, icebox cakes, cupcakes, roll-up cakes and upside-down cakes. In two instances, she performed a baker’s sleight of hand, working her way backward from popular cake mixes to reclaim the lost originals. Her restoration efforts produced recipes for cherry chip cake with cherry buttercream and Watergate cake, a pistachio cake with pistachio frosting.

If the recipe names in Richardson’s book — like “maple pecan chiffon cake with brown butter icing” — seem seductive, the photographs are downright pornographic. Forget “Fifty Shades of Grey.” This is the year’s sexiest book.

For the home cook, main courses are insidious. They monopolize time, attention and energy, and as a result, the accompanying dishes become little more than afterthoughts. Fred Thompson remedies this situation in FRED THOMPSON’S SOUTHERN SIDES: 250 Dishes That Really Make the Plate (University of North Carolina, $35).

The flavors here are big. For anyone who has been serving steamed green beans as a default side dish, Thompson administers shock therapy with full-tilt offerings like fried eggplant with étouffé sauce, spicy speckled butterbeans, bourbon creamed corn and wiggly Jell-O and aspic salads. He’s punchy but not ham-handed. And he has a missionary’s fervor for the sides and vegetables that he calls, in his introduction, “the apex of Southern cooking.”

Many New Yorkers know the names Allison Vines-Rushing and Slade Rushing. This husband-and-wife team ran the kitchen at Jack’s Luxury Oyster Bar, a minuscule restaurant in Manhattan that developed a cult following after it opened in 2003, even though the menu offered just one entree and one dessert. In a move that stunned the local fooderati, they pulled up stakes and moved to Louisiana two years later, establishing a restaurant in Abita Springs, outside New Orleans, just in time for Hurricane Katrina.

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A cactus taco, from "Tacos, Tortas and Tamales."Credit
Todd Coleman/Wiley

SOUTHERN COMFORT: A New Take on the Recipes We Grew Up With (Ten Speed Press, $35) presents the same kind of inventive, updated Southern cooking that made the couple culinary darlings in Manhattan and that they now serve at MiLa, their restaurant in the Marriott Hotel in New Orleans. Louisiana is the starting point, but France and Italy work their way into the conversation. The biscuits call for a little crème fraîche. The shallot corn bread stuffing in a recipe for grilled calamari has bits of pancetta along with shreds of collard greens. Rushing adapted a Normandy crepe from his days cooking at Fleur de Sel in the Flatiron district, then gave it a New Orleans makeover by adding sliced bananas and rum, and topping it with brown-sugar whipped cream. Bananas Foster never had it so good.

THE GREAT MEAT COOKBOOK (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $40) might rank as the longest postscript in food history. Its author, Bruce Aidells, seemed to have pronounced the final word on the subject 14 years ago in “The Complete Meat Cookbook,” written with Denis Kelly.

Not so. In fact, Aidells argues that consumers now confront a different world when it comes to meat choices. A reaction against industrially produced beef, chicken and pork has encouraged a market for free-range chickens, hormone-free cattle and heirloom-breed pigs. Aidells and his co-author, Anne-Marie Ramo, guide readers through this often confusing territory and, with rising meat costs in mind, highlight cuts that deliver flavor on the cheap.

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And flavor is indeed the byword here. Aidells goes in for lusty marinades and spice rubs. His panbroiled hanger steak, marinated in a two-fisted beer broth, lingers on the palate not just for hours but well into the next day. And anyone in despair when confronted with yet another bland, by-the-book meat loaf recipe need look no further for fresh inspiration. Aidell’s version, barbecue-glazed and tricked out with cheddar cheese and buttermilk, proves it’s possible to reanimate a culinary cliché.

Eric Lanlard, who runs a London cafe and cooking school called Cake Boy, operates on a simple premise in TART IT UP! Sweet and Savory Tarts and Pies (Mitchell ­Beazley, $19.99). Anything that tastes good tastes even better in a buttery crust. Zucchini and roasted peppers? Yes. Blood sausage and apples? Yes again. Apricot, honey and pistachio nuts? Yes, yes and yes.

Doubters can start with his tart made with black olives and artichoke hearts, thick with heavy cream and goat cheese. At that point, there’s no turning back. Two high points are reinterpreted classics: a tarte Tatin composed with heirloom tomatoes rather than apples and a fat calzone made with fluffy brioche dough and stuffed with, among other ingredients, chorizo and anchovies.

The Travel Channel and buccaneers like Anthony Bourdain have whetted the public appetite for cookbooks that take readers to the farthest reaches of Planet Earth. The pictures and the stories are memorable, the recipes too often impossible — unless you have access to ingredients found only in the Amazon rain forest or the upper peaks of the Tien Shan range.

TURKEY (Chronicle Books, $35), by Leanne Kitchen, a photographer and writer in Australia, explores a cuisine that’s exotic to most Americans but not out of reach for home cooks. Half travel album, half recipe collection, her book presents an enticing array of dishes that require only a few exotic ingredients: pomegranate molasses, pepper paste and pekmez, a syrup made from grapes, figs or mulberries.

This is the Mediterranean diet in a different key, with the Persian and Georgian influences on Turkish cuisine reflected in a fondness for fruits and nuts in savory ­dishes. A walnut-garlic dressing breathes new life into chicken salad. A plain dish of octopus, olives and potatoes gets a nifty little zing from an orange-paprika vinaigrette. The degree of difficulty, in Olympic terms, is in most cases somewhere between three and four.

The vogue for vernacular ethnic food, the kind served from trucks and stalls, shows no sign of losing steam. In fact, taco connoisseurship is reaching frightening heights. Roberto Santibañez, the chef and owner of the Fonda restaurants in Brooklyn and Manhattan, goes easy on the erudition but lets enthusiasm run riot in TACOS, TORTAS AND TAMALES: Flavors From the Griddles, Pots and Streetside Kitchens of Mexico (Wiley, $19.99), written with JJ Goode. The book is a big, warm embrace of cheap eats meant to be consumed on the run — what Santibañez calls “everyday food.” It’s an eye-opening experience for anyone who has never heard of cow-head tacos. Santibañez opens the door to a rich world of flavors and ingredients with recipes that include stewed frankfurter tortas, strawberry tamales, chopped liver tacos and a terrific lineup of smoothies, fruit drinks, salsas, cocktails and desserts. It’s a real free-for-all, since virtually anything edible can find a home in a tortilla or a torta. Santibañez calls his subject a culinary solar system. The heavenly bodies include duck tacos in a cream sauce spiked with habanero peppers and a cactus torta loaded up with queso fresco and pico de gallo.

Susan Feniger’s STREET FOOD: Irresistibly Crispy, Creamy, Crunchy, Spicy, Sticky, Sweet Recipes (Clarkson Potter, $27.50), written with Kajsa Alger and Liz Lachman, comes packaged with a sly wink. The title refers to Feniger’s restaurant, Street, in Hollywood, but it’s more than an allusion, since the restaurant’s menu features global street food.

Feniger is known to television viewers as one of the stars of “Too Hot Tamales” on the Food Network back in the 1990s and as a finalist in the Bravo series “Top Chef Masters.” She has a big, ingratiating smile — and her publisher seems to have decided that readers need to see all thousand watts of it in photographs scattered throughout the book. She does take her internationalism seriously, though. Her reach extends to creamed corn with coconut milk from Thailand, mung bean pancakes from Korea, carrot salad with harissa vinaigrette from Morocco, cactus relleno with corn and arbol salsa from Mexico, cheese grits with three-pepper relish from the Southern United States and sour apple fritters from Croatia.

In any country, Feniger writes in her manifesto-like introduction, “what you see and taste on the street is the best food you’ll find” — a sentiment that’s perfectly in tune with the times.